Transcript for July 2

MS. MITCHELL: And the Democrats, of course, also do this. This is how the Boston Globe covered a Howard Dean-for-president campaign rally back in 2004. “Dean ... told a crowd of supporters [that his campaign] was ‘a struggle between us and the Washington politicians and the established press.’” Bill Safire, what does this remind you of?

MR. SAFIRE: It reminds me of a piece that I did back in the Carter administration where I wrote that Billy Carter, the president’s brother, was overheard talking many times with the Libyan Embassy, and the White House got very excited about that. Why? Because they said the Libyans didn’t know that we had a tap on their embassy. Now, that struck everybody in Washington as totally foolish because for the last 50 years, every single embassy in this town is bugged. Now here’s the president saying, “Who knew that—the details of this program?”

MS. MITCHELL: Let me refresh all of our memories about something else that happened. Take a look at this piece of film.

(Videotape, September 16, 1970):

VICE PRES. SPIRO AGNEW: In the United States today we have more than our share of the nattering nabobs of negativism.

(End videotape)

MS. MITCHELL: OK. Now whose alliterative phrase was “nattering nabobs of negativism,” Mr. Safire?

MR. SAFIRE: Well, Mr. Agnew was kind enough to credit me with that afterwards because I’m an alliteration nut.

MS. MITCHELL: This was when you were the speechwriter in the White House.

MR. SAFIRE: Right. And I was on loan to Agnew for that speech. I didn’t write the Des Moines speech, Pat Buchanan did that, where he really zapped the press. And again, the Nixon administration in that case got a leg up. And people said, “Hey, yeah, we’re angry at not just Nixon. We’re angry at the Congress and we’re angry at the media.”

MR. BENNETT: Can—may I—can I, can I...

MS. PRIEST: Still, the point is the tension between the media and the government is long-standing. And that’s to be expected. And in fact, all these—many of the people getting up to lambaste the media now are also people that we talk to with our stories, to vet our stories, to say, “What is it in this story that you’re most concerned about?”

MS. MITCHELL: You mean, to hold things back?

MS. PRIEST: To hold things back. In the prison story, we talked with the administration. No one in the administration asked us not to publish the story. In fact, people said, “We know you have your job to do, but please don’t publish the names of the countries where the prisons are located.” So there is a reasoned dialogue that often goes on between the media and the government behind, behind all this.

MS. MITCHELL: That was not the case with the NSA surveillance stories.

MR. BENNETT: That’s correct. Can I say something?

MS. MITCHELL: Please.

MR. BENNETT: Because I’m being quoted and talked about. I’m right here.

You know, I’m right here. I can, I can make my own case.

MS. MITCHELL: Well, please weigh in.

MR. HARWOOD: (Unintelligible)...Bennett

MR. BENNETT: All right, now you’ve got, you’ve got, you’ve got three people on one side, you’ve got me on the other side. Let me just, let me just state my position.

It’s not time to break out the champagne and the Pulitzers. This is not about politics, not from my perspective. It’s about the United States of America and the security of the United States of America. The difference is, the government was elected. People may not like the Bush administration, but they were elected and they are entitled to due consideration on these matters. The American people, in fact, believe in a free press, as I do, and I don’t believe in prior restraint of the press. But the American people are saying, if you listen to them in very, very large and consistent numbers—and an awful lot of people across the board are saying this—is four times now, four times in eight months, Dana Priest’s story, the National Surveillance Security Agency monitoring story, the USA Today story about data mining. “Oh, sorry,” they tell us on Friday, “We maybe got that wrong. Our sources were wrong.”

MS. MITCHELL: Well, wait a second, the story wasn’t wrong. The—what they apologized for is that one of the companies, or two of the companies...

MR. BENNETT: Two of the companies.

MS. MITCHELL: ...did not have contracts.

MR. BENNETT: Big, big part of the story.

MS. MITCHELL: But that the—but that the information...

MS. PRIEST: Yeah.

MS. MITCHELL: ...was still being...

MS. PRIEST: The program was still valid.

MR. BENNETT: But they—a big part of the story...

MS. MITCHELL: But the fundamental part of the story was...

MR. BENNETT: ...big—big—big part of the story they got wrong. All right, check your facts when you’re running a front page...

MS. MITCHELL: I have.

MR. BENNETT: ...when they’re running front page, USA Today needs to check its facts. And now, and now, and now this story on the SWIFT. And now people are saying, is there a competition here?

MS. MITCHELL: Which no one has denied.

MR. BENNETT: No, no one has denied it except the people at Treasury and again, Tom Kean, are saying this thing has now destroyed the capacity of our program. Again, the difference is the government of the United States was elected to protect our security. It isn’t always in the service of security to leak. Katharine Graham, in The New York Times today, Katharine Graham cites a very interesting example in 1983 where she said the press went too far. It reported about secret communications between Syrian terrorists and their Iranian—their Iranian bosses, which led later, she said, to the deaths of 240 Marines. This can happen. We are in war. This is classified...

MS. PRIEST: You know, I heartily appreciate your talking on behalf of all the American people because when...

MR. BENNETT: ...it’s—it’s not—I’m not. I’m talking about a lot of the American—wait, let me finish. Let me finish.

MS. PRIEST: ...my stories ran I received several—many, many people thanking me because they thought that they went—including...

MR. BENNETT: You don’t want to be—you don’t, you don’t want to put this to an opinion poll.

MS. PRIEST: ...including four-star...

MR. BENNETT: You do not want to do this on an opinion poll.

MS. PRIEST: ...including active-duty four-star generals.

MR. BENNETT: Can I, can I just...

MS. PRIEST: Some people think that the administration has gone too far in some of the counterterrorism measures they’ve taken, and that some of the things that we were—are revealing are creating a debate that could not have happened before.

MR. BENNETT: Yeah, and the shutting down of prisons...

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